which means the strangest dreams in the world: smuggling a baby hairy mammoth over the border in a semi truck with a collapsible cab, discussing the weaknesses of the modern age with the contemporary art critic i'm taking notes for, driving a truck through a tractor race with a five-year-old girl running beside me, a painting waterfall with the emotions running in bright color (framed by a window set back from the waterfall by a few feet), waking in the middle of the night wishing i could talk to someone i can no longer talk to.

cough cough cough. cough cough. cough. tomorrow i'm going to have a little eggie-dying thing for pagans and heathens in the neighborhood.

but here's a piece i wrote today, and i think my fever shows through. argh, what am i writing these days?

*

Famous Dead Men and a Blue Bucket Game

Twenty rowdy knuckle-crackers on a binge after a few hours of toil, they drag logs from under pebbles and heave the wood into burning stacks. With sticks in hand, and the hairs on their wrists bristling, they prod the new wood into position, arrange embers around damp spots, and turn to each other, their tongues heavy-lively with the events that we’ll later strike into oblivion. Close light under the sunset, their hats dip and reflect brim-beacons off into the water, where you can trace the wakes throughout the bay, a fine series of elliptical radii all centering in for the fun. For them, the night promises embarrassing nudity and at least one person bound to burn himself enough to amuse the others.

Near the hightide line, a barrel-thighed woman arrives and pummels her friend with the back of her hand and he nearly goes over backwards. When he regains his footing, she passes the extra can of beer she’s brought him and they both stand there rocking around on their haunches. After watching three more boats arrive and get tied up—newcomers coming shore by hopping the rims of boats—the woman turns to her friend, who is halfway through his first beer and three-quarters towards the next, and asks him, “if you were fake,” she says,” if everything about you were engineered by a highly invisible force reveling in the distribution of creation from the elements of chaos,” she says, “would you try to hide your elbows?”

Nearby, a three-year old runs over and pinches the hamstrings of a boy, who is standing on a bucket holding one end of a rope; the other end is held by a teenager on another bucket six feet away. The teenager owns a half-look of bemused condescension—busy trying to decide whether to let the young boy pull him off his bucket, or whether to yank the kid hard, face-first into the sand and teach him the tough truth of Hegelian might. The teenager spreads a few armlengths of rope.

The younger boy, standing very carefully on his blue bucket, shouts over the beer-sound, ignoring the tiny pinching at his knee, “Did you hear the story of Leo and Fyodor?”

The teenager shakes his head and draws in three more lengths of the rope, flinging the excess behind the bucket. His body roils with strategy, his skin a red fury pop. He quarters, decks, each muscle flexes, his elbow lifted, winding the rope around his wrist tightly, organic in his decision to win.

Next to the younger boy, the three-year-old, while being kicked and grabbed at by the boy who is busy, thankyouverymuch, trying to depose the teenager who of course has greater strength and versatility but lacks something the younger boy thinks, and while the three-year old is maneuvering around a boot of sand being shoved into her mouth, she mutters something that sounds suspiciously like: “As of late, we perhaps find ourselves restless and impatient with the lines and war fronts and divisions set forth under the name of something that’s apparently opposed to something else. So, in the interest of reconciliation, you, the younger, will speak of the record whereas your supposed opponent will speak of something else.”

The younger boy hears part of this and glances down for the first time at the three-year old, whom he has never seen before, but that’s not unusual in the blendings and torqueings of a fishing community that finds itself, in this new confused century, grappling the dangers of change. As the younger boy looks down at the toddler who is still pinching his hamstrings and muttering polysyllabic oddities, the teenager draws in the rope and gives a good yank.

The younger boy has seen this coming though, and allows the rope to flow out of his hands instead of being carried away with it. He in turn hopes to see the teenager roll over backwards and onto the beach. This does not happen though.

“In 1878,” shouts the younger boy to the teenager, his articulation a clear revenge, “three years before a death, Leo sends a telegram to Fyodor, a sallow epileptic man once advised to grow a beard to cover the lower half of his face, which some might have compared in beauty to a badly frostbitten knee. Fyodor receives this telegram and very quickly handwrites his response. Yes of course, he says. Let’s make it then, and shall we meet at that bar we both know so intimately? Fyodor runs it over to the posting station, and asks when his telegram might be expected to arrive at Leo’s estate. They tell him in a few weeks, but there is, unfortunately, an error in the transmission. The record is unclear on the error, but somehow the two men, having thought themselves very clever to arrange a meeting after so many years of mutual admiration and criticism, fail to meet on a particular April evening. Three years later, one finds himself crying at the death of the other.”

During the tale, the teenager has been sneaking more and more coils of rope to his side. The six feet between them snakes and pools, dips and snakes, and directly in the center of this distance, at a point three feet equidistant from either combatant, rests a halibut hook, its metallic cravenness shining red from the fire. Prior to the post-toil party on the beach, one of the fishermen had sharpened that hook with a rough-grade rasp, so that now, at the party, the hook curls jagged enough to immediately pierce the thick mouthplates of any halibut jaw, or perhaps through the malleable ribcage of a young person’s falling body. The hook is half-buried in the sand and so neither the teenager nor the younger boy see it; instead the teenager notes that the younger has reached the end of the long rope. Now it seems a matter of simply tugging hard and quickly.

But the younger boy bends and bends again at the waist. The teenager rethinks his strategy and lets the younger boy gain back a few feet of rope before saying, “Have you heard the real story of Leo and Fyodor?”

“No,” says the younger boy, who is already cringing at the idea of war, division, commas this side said to be more beautiful more perfect more interior dramatic loving delicate organic playful or full of the soft underskin of bananas.

Back over by the bonfire, a man takes off his boots, sets them on a log, and then moves to leap over the fire, not the whole fire but a tributary on the northeastern fork. Only the man miscalculates and trips himself up on a rootball, falls with his face in the sand and the lower half of his body directly in flame. His toes wiggle as three other people immediately yank him off the fire and drag him down to the ocean, where he dips only his feet in, and begs off being thrown in all the way. After his feet hiss in the ocean, he makes his way back up, mumbling about the long dark night, the orange oriental sun, a creation of joints and exteriors, and the waving nature of waves. The three-year-old follows him, whacking the back of his knees with a stick. Back in front of the fire, the barrel-thighed woman pummels his arm, offers him another beer, and leans into him, letting him know in a very indescribable way that for him, and only for him, the blue hairs are out tonight, and they are waving and again waving strong.

At our buckets down the beach, the younger boy and the teenager are still at it, much to the annoyance of the teenager, who knows very well he is being watched. He must solve the matter quickly, and in his favor, and without dillydally weakness unpatriotic behavior or cannibalism, which is, in general, frowned upon.

“So,” he says, “in the bar in St. Petersburg, a very disagreeable and disorderly man sits at the table with two shots of vodka drawn and set in place, one in front of him, the other placed on the edge nearest a vacant chair. The light in the bar is settled with a particular hint of brown-grey, and four sailors sit in one of the corners with their muddied boots propped against nothing. They flick their cards at each other silently, and drink beer, smoke their cigarettes, and occasionally eye the man, who is Fyodor, sitting solitary, expectantly in the middle of the bar. Fyodor looks up at the door every five minutes or so, whether it opens or not. He has arranged to meet Leo there, and knowing the nature of Leo—a gambler, a womanizer, a wealthy punk with an occasional literary bloodlust—Fyodor thinks Leo trustworthy. Like Leo, Fyodor is a gambler, something of a womanizer, a surly man with occasional manias, and so he too is trustworthy. Fyodor sits at that table for hours and hours and just as he’s about to get up and leave, the wind knocks open the door. There stands a lone horse, nostril twitching, looking straight towards Leo’s vodka. In his disappointment, Fyodor pushes past the horse and starts walking quickly home over the cobblestones, listening to the slogging grime of swamp through canals, when out of the alley a hand grabs him. Shouting in fear, Fyodor whirls and pulls away but the hand drags him closer, and suddenly Fyodor can see a face and he has never met the face but he knows the face. Both men feel themselves unworthy and ragged, but Leo still smirks at Fyodor. “How very dramatic,” Fyodor says in response. But then Leo pulls Fyodor into a hug, and the two men take a pause without narrative before walking over to the nearest bar. Three years later, when Leo is weeping for Fyodor’s death, he thinks of the poker game they had scheduled in just under another two months. For sure, he moans, one of them would have won.”

With that, the teenager gives the biggest yank on the rope yet. Whether the younger boy sees it coming and lets the rope flow through his hands thus giving the teenager too much play for his yank and sending him spinning off backwards, or whether the younger boy doesn’t see it coming and is finally pulled off the bucket, or whether the younger boy sees it coming and makes a different decision, well, unfortunately that wasn’t seen, as I was turned away, watching the three-year-old leap up over the fire, over and over again.